14 DAY TRIAL // The Vishera series of central processing units from Advanced Micro Devices, like the 8-core FX-8350, need motherboards with the AM3+ socket to work, which is why Gigabyte's 990FXA-UD3 exists.
The 990FXA-UD3 is a curious thing really. It has been revised five times, yet the latest iteration is called 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4, not 5.
Obviously, this has to do with the fact that two of its previous revisions were called rev. 1.1 and rev. 1.2.
Anyway, the 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4 motherboard has eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, six handled by the SB950 southbridge and two managed by a Marvell 9172 controller.
It also gets four DDR3 DIMM memory slots (up to 64 GB of DDR3 RAM are supported, dual-channel at 2133 MHz), a 10-phase VRM, two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots, two PCI Express 2.0 x4 slots, and a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot, plus a legacy PCI slot.
That's right, unlike Intel-ready motherboards, this one doesn't have any PCI Express 3.0 slots. It's a good thing video cards haven't quite reached the bottleneck of 2.0, otherwise this would have been a big disadvantage.
Of course, all these specifications, or at least most of them, were already there even before 990FXA-UD3 Rev 3 became 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4.
What Rev. 4 brings are a 10-phase CPU VRM (Digital Power Engine), new heatsinks for the VRM and chipset, a different set of chokes, capacitors, and MOSFETs, and Gigabyte's newest UEFI BIOS setup program.
All the changes are there because AMD wants to make sure the motherboard can perform well under pressure.
That said, the rest of the feature set is as follows: four USB 3.0 ports, 8-channel HD audio driven by Realtek ALC889 CODEC, and a Gigabit Ethernet port (Realtek 8111F).
The gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 Rev. 4 should have the same price as its predecessor: $140 / €107 – 140.